PurplePrice Mag · · 2 min read
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In design history AEG holds a special place: it was the first large company to entrust everything that represented it, from its trademark to its products, from advertising to factories, to a single designer. It marked the birth of what we now call corporate identity, and of a new figure, the industrial designer.
Rathenau and electricity
The company was founded in Berlin in 1883 as the Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft by Emil Rathenau, who had acquired the licences for Thomas Edison's light bulbs in Germany. A few years later it took the name Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, “General Electricity Company”. Light bulbs, motors, generators, power stations and trams: by the early twentieth century AEG was one of the largest electrical companies in the world.
Peter Behrens
In 1907 AEG appointed Peter Behrens as artistic consultant. An architect and graphic designer, he had already worked in the Darmstadt Artists' Colony and that same year was among the founders of the Deutscher Werkbund. Behrens designed the logo, typefaces, catalogues and posters, and then the products: arc lamps, fans, clocks and the famous electric kettles, made of interchangeable parts so that many models could be obtained from few components. They were objects without superfluous decoration, conceived for mass production. He also designed the factories: the Turbine Factory in Berlin-Moabit (1909), in glass and steel, is considered one of the first buildings of modern architecture.
In those years three young men who would change architecture worked in Behrens's office: Walter Gropius, future founder of the Bauhaus, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
From AEG to Electrolux
Under Nazism AEG exploited forced labour, like many large German companies. After the war it merged with Telefunken, ran into crisis in the 1970s and in 1985 was acquired by Daimler-Benz, which broke it up in the 1990s. In 1994 the household appliance division, AEG Hausgeräte, passed to the Swedish group Electrolux, which has owned the AEG brand since 2005 and uses it for washing machines, ovens, fridges and small appliances.
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